


Namesake

by imperiatrix



Category: Hamlet - All Media Types, Hamlet - Shakespeare, SHAKESPEARE William - Works
Genre: Americana, Emotional Infidelity, F/M, Gratuitous Wyoming, Hamlet's name is "Junior", Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-05
Updated: 2016-09-05
Packaged: 2018-08-11 20:50:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7907245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imperiatrix/pseuds/imperiatrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“My brother’s named Claude,” he says.</p><p>(Written in response to a prompt on tumblr for Gertrude/Claudius, mechanic and pastry chef AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Namesake

They have their first real conversation after the wedding planning has already commenced, which isn’t too unusual around here. Sometimes, couples don’t speak properly until an hour after “I do” and cake-cutting, first dances and wistful eye-gazing. This couple meets after she already has an engagement ring on her finger, after she’s picked out a name for the first kid and imagined each feature on the child’s face a dozen times over; freckles here—no, there—and eyes just like his father’s. Her and the fiancé, that’s the only conversation that they ever have: what will the child be like? What should we name him? She wants to name him after the fiancé’s father, Claude, but he says no.

“My brother’s named Claude,” he says, pulling off the newly paved interstate and taking the exit towards Grand Encampment. “Wyoming people say its bad luck to name a baby after the living.”

“But you’re not a Wyoming person anymore, are you?” She says. He chuckles and slows down to twenty miles an hour so she can watch the mountain slip by.

“No, I suppose not,” he concedes, dropping a hand onto her knee. She feels lightheaded from the obvious affection as much as the thin air. “But I gotta be, as long as we’re up here. For the family.” He adds.

“Our family. Yeah,” she says. “I can be a Wyoming person for a week or so.”

It’s not far to Encampment, and they can smell wood dust from the sawmill almost immediately. He points out old landmarks as they pass them, ringing with the pride of someone who grew up content, busy with friends and adventure. “There’s the entrance to the old copper mine,” he’d say, gesturing to a tiny hole in one of the cliffs, “and that,” he’d point now to a gully with a fat warning sign plugged through the center, “is where Claude—my brother, I’ve mentioned him—got his foot stuck for five hours one night. I thought we’d have to saw it off, I really did,” he’d laugh here, and she’d laugh with him. “The McKay’s used to live out there in the sweetest log cabin you’d ever see,” he says now, pointing to a lone brick chimney surrounded by scorched grass, “guess they don’t anymore.” He laughs again. She does not.

Her name is Gertrude, and his name is Hamlet, and they are very much in love. Gertrude, as she recounts one or twice for each resident of Grand Encampment, all of whom seem to consider Hamlet their brother or son or father in some fashion, was a riveter in a munitions factory. Hamlet was a captain, young and highly accomplished. They spent one week inseparable, he sitting behind her at the factory and shouting over the roar of her riveting gun, and then got engaged on the night he came back from Korea. Eight days, a fat stack of letters, and he was hauling her out in a pretty new dress to the edge of nowhere, seven-thousand feet above ground.

They drive right up to Claude’s bakery. He lives above it, sleeping on a cot and waking up before dawn like a farmer. The pavement outside is the only place in Encampment that doesn’t smell like motor oil or smelting, and so there are a few people milling outside. They turn when Hamlet pulls up with his pretty new fiancée, not recognizing either face until Claude comes bursting out of the front door.

“Hamlet!” he shouts, dusting flour onto his pants legs before opening the car door for his brother. “I called Ma and Pa as soon as you got off the phone. They’re in the sitting room.” He looks at Gertrude, then says “Hello, ma’am,” and bustles back inside. The door puffs milldust and flour behind him as it closes.

“He doesn’t like people,” Hamlet shrugs, and Gertrude accepts it.

She accepts it when one week in Grand Encampment for the wedding becomes one month to watch after Hamlet’s ailing father, one year to take over the bakery that Claude and Hamlet’s mother simply cannot run alone, three years because the mill’s mechanic got his hand crushed under a horse’s hoof and Gertrude’s the only person with any experience beyond popping open the hood of a busted car and neither of them can bear to leave Encampment, not now. Not when there’s nothing left for them at the bottom of the mountain.

Gertrude goes on believing that Claude just doesn’t like people for four years until Hamlet leaves for another war, unable to stand working in the bakery while his wife earns a higher wage as a mechanic, and she’s one month pregnant with some child whose face she’s imagined a million times, who she’s given more names than all of the breaths she’s taken in her whole life, who she won’t even know exists until it’s too late and her husband is across the Pacific Ocean again. Claude helps her down the stairs in these months, feeds her mashed strawberries on salty bits of toast, holds back her stringy hair when she hacks air and little else into the trash bin every morning. They rarely speak, but Gertrude’s thoughts shift from missing her husband to aching for a word, a simple acknowledgement of something other than familial obligation, from Claude. Sometimes she has fever dreams about kissing him, fantasies where the baby looks nothing like her husband and everything like his brother. _Eight_ _days_ , she thinks, _I was such a fool. I still am._

“I wanted to name the baby Claude,” she says, while heaving into the trash. “Before I knew that was your name.” Claude nods, as if this makes sense. “Hamlet says Wyoming people don’t like to call babies after the living. Bad luck, bad something, bad everything.”

“That’s not true. He likes to tell tales. We both do.” Claude says. “Wyoming people fear all kinds of things, but that’s not one of them.”

“Oh,” Gertrude says, and hacks again.

“And besides, I think you can count yourself a Wyoming person by now.” He adds.

Gertrude had forgotten her loneliness up until then, until it was washed away and disremembered. The cold of being an outsider here had become part of living, and now she was warm.

“Okay,” she says, “then I’ll name him Claude. Hamlet’s not here, so I’ll do what I want, right?”

“Just call him Junior,” Claude suggests. “And we’ll know.”

“Yeah,” Gertrude laughs, “we’ll know.”

And they know. And they know it all the keener when Hamlet comes back and Gertrude feels unfaithful when she kisses him in full view of Claude, when she starts to miss his gentle hands and constant mumbling as he worked, the way he spoke like a faulty spigot, in drips and trickles and then in crashing waves. She missed the way he never called her smart or funny, but instead asked for her advice or laughed full-bellied at her jokes. He never called her beautiful, but always looked at her with eyes wide open. So she calls her son Junior, and she knows.

“I don’t wanna ‘Dear John’ my own husband,” Gertrude says. She rinses the plate again and flicks the spray from the ceramic before handing it off to Junior, who chews the edge with his soft baby gums. “I mean, maybe I do though.” Junior giggles. “Oh, rats, now I gotta wash that again. Come on, buddy. You’re no help at all,” she sighs, taking the plate back and rewashing it. “How’re you gonna get to college when you can’t even learn to wash?” She scolds, smiling. Junior gurgles at her, grabs the edge of her apron and tries to sit up.

“Oh, gosh,” she says, nudging him away. “Claude?” She shouts, “where are you?”

She hears the rapid patter of his feet coming from the bakery to the top floor. “Gert?” He says, head poking in. “You need me?”

“Yeah, I need help. Junior’s acting up. Need you to get him outta my way so I can get to work on time.”

Claudius laughs and hefts the basket in which Gertrude’s put the baby off of the low kitchen table. “Tell Hamlet that this tour is the last one, for my sake. Honestly, woman, I feel like this boy’s pa sometimes.”

“Feels like that for me too, Claude.” It’s meant to be a tease, but it doesn’t sound that way to her ears once she’s said it, once it’s too late to take back.

Hamlet dies at home, of an infection from a cut while working in the bakery. A tour in Korea and two in Vietnam couldn’t take him down, but a cutting knife, improperly sanitized, does him in fine. Gertrude feels a wash of all the wrong emotions when she packs up her mourning dresses for good. Junior keeps his Sunday Bests out for another month after she does, and never quite stops wearing black. He leaves his room less and less, spends most of his time reading books she’s never heard in languages she didn’t know he knew of and writing letters to his strange radical friends at University which he needs posted three or four times a week. She doesn’t like his new friends, but she can’t dare mention her distaste without Junior shouting her down about Uncle Claude, about how he knows her better than she knows herself, about how he’s glad his father died before he lived to see Gertrude make bad their marriage vows with Hamlet’s own brother, and he wishes he could've died before seeing it too. 

Gertrude doesn’t know what in her life to regret, but she knows its there somewhere. The thing she did wrong. Maybe it was that week in the munitions factory, or maybe it was when she forgave Hamlet for laughing at the burned down cabin outside of town. She doesn’t know. It’s all she can think about. That, and all the names she almost gave her son. So she calls down the stairs to Claude, and she says, “Come up here, Claude, and don’t you dare ignore me, because I need you and I know you can hear me just fine.”

Claude puts his hands on his hips and inhales, exhales, inhales again. He thinks about Gertrude, about how Hamlet never once stepped out on her or gave her bruises. He wishes now that he had, wishes that his brother had been a demon instead of an absentee. What he wants to say is, _I’m coming right up, I love you, I have for years and never spoke a word because I loved you_. What he wants to say is, _I never cared about the engine grease_ and _I didn’t mind when Junior stripped the transmission on the delivery truck because it meant I got to spend the whole weekend watching you fix it_ , and _that’s what I live for_ and _I love you_ and _I’m coming right up there now, don't wait another moment_.

“Claude?” Gertrude almost whispers. She pokes her head into the narrow flight of stairs, hair falling over her cheek and chin. “Claude, please say something.” 

“I don’t wanna be a fling for you,” Claudius says, braver than he feels.

Gertrude goes quiet. Claudius closes his eyes and listens. He can hear the belt motor running their gas heating, can hear Junior playing guitar—probably on the stoop, beneath the magnolias, right where Claudius would come to give him lessons—can hear the quiet pulse of Gertrude’s breath as if it were right against his ear.

He can hear Gertrude suck in a long breath. “You wouldn’t be,” she admits.

Junior’s guitar wails, the sawmill spits out dust, and the copper mines cough smoke but no copper for the fifth year in a row. Cars run by the exit to Grand Encampment, Wyoming, at sixty miles per hour, seven thousand feet above sea level, and the sun bakes holes through the paved streets.

Slowly, as if remembering how to move, Claudius climbs the stairs. Gertrude is waiting for him, same as always.

**Author's Note:**

> Grand Encampment is a real place, and I apologize to everyone who has ever lived there.
> 
> This fic was originally posted here http://imperiatrix.tumblr.com/post/86966918406/cladiusgertrude-mechanicstruggling-pastry-chef


End file.
